Solana’s Breakpoint conference was a great success! Nearly everyone from the Solana ecosystem flew into Lisbon for four days of talks, workshops, and networking.
Due to nearly two years of isolation and travel bans, Breakpoint was the first time many people in the Solana community managed to meet face to face. Accordingly, the atmosphere at the conference was electric as Solana came out of its shell under the Portuguese sun.
Solana is currently the fastest blockchain in the world, and its token began discovering all-time highs as the conference started. Accordingly, the excitement in the air was palpable at Solana’s first international conference as project heads and thought leaders shared ideas and networked night and day.
Solana’s Breakpoint Conference Sported Back-to-Back Agenda
Some of the event’s highlights included significant updates from Solana Co-Founders Anatoly Yakavenko and Raj Gokal on the overwhelming growth of the network and a talk from Alexis Ohanian, the Co-Founder of Reddit, who pledged $100 million to develop social media on Solana.
There were talks about the future of DeFi, NFTs, and how Solana could change blockchain gaming and social media landscape with its massive throughput and low-cost per transaction. Hype men pumped up the crowd and described the metaverse on Solana as something unlike any other.
Breakpoint highlighted that Solana was doing something special to advance the current state of the blockchain community. Nearly every presentation had incredible data to share about their project and the outlook of Solana’s future.
Anatoly Yakovenko, Co-Founder of Solana, shared some mind-blowing statistics about Solana with the conference’s main hall. Yakovenko said, “In relativistic terms, Solana’s about four times slower than it should be. The speed of light halfway around the world is about 110 milliseconds. It’s going to take a lot of blood, sweat, and tears to get there, but in theory, that could be the theoretical limit for how fast the network is.”
Hubble Protocol Shines at Breakpoint Developers Workshop
The project lead and head developer of Hubble Protocol, Marius Ciubotariu, was among the presenters leading a workshop on the conference’s first day. Marius’ workshop was one of the first technical presentations given at an international Solana conference.
Marius talked about some of the challenges he faced when he first started building on Solana. Then, he shared with the audience how he managed to overcome these challenges and find solutions for building a protocol that can onboard millions of users.
Hubble’s lead developer delivered his workshop to a packed house at the SUD Lisbon conference location. The room was full of developers who were all facing the same major issues with coding smart contracts in Rust on Solana.
Rust is a relatively new entrant to the DeFi smart contract scene. Deploying Rust smart contracts on Solana, a blazingly fast blockchain (65,000 TPS) that’s relatively new as well, presents yet another learning curve developers must deal with in the early stages of the network.
Marius delivered an insightful workshop that stood out for its open and frank discussion of workarounds and solutions for coding on Solana. Some left the hall impressed enough to share Marius’ workshop on social media. For example, Cryptonary gave Marius high marks for his efforts when it tweeted, “Great talk from @HubbleMarkets about developing on @solana,” commenting on an uploaded video of the workshop’s tail end.
Unfortunately, the conference’s live stream cut off the first half of Marius’ workshop, “Maintaining Global State in Solana.” However, Solana has made Marius’ entire presentation available here on Youtube and the rest of the events recorded at Breakpoint.
Building Momentum After Breakpoint for Solana and Hubble
The big news at the conference was Solana breaking into the crypto Top 5 as its community began piling into Lisbon to get to business during the day and boogie down at night. Other big conference reveals included statistics that show Solana is doing better than the average blockchain.
Presentations revealed that the total value locked (TVL) in DeFi contracts on Solana topped $15 billion, and the network’s NFT market had gone absolutely parabolic in the September and October leading up to the conference. The number of developers Solana had risen to 1,750 by the conference kick-off, and Co-Founder Gokal announced that Solana’s plan was to increase that number to a million with sights set on servicing a billion people.
Hubble Protocol increased its network of friends while Breakpoint was in full swing. Marius shook hands and traded information with tons of people from projects who thought Hubble had something to offer the world and wanted to work together, so expect partnership announcements as Hubble gears up for launch.
